With the large lead shown by Mercedes in 2020, few could predict seeing the Anglo-German cars being caught up and overtaken by Red Bull Honda. The regulatory changes that have reshaped the bottom design of the cars forced Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas to chase for much of the season, brushing a decidedly unexpected scenario, probably also for the protagonists on the track. “We thought we could handle the bottom cut in front of the rear wheels“, He admitted Toto Wolff, team principal and co-owner of the team, adding: “With the advantage we had in 2020, we thought we could compensate for that. We saw it as a kind of challenge, but only during testing did we realize how far we were behind. I can assume it cost us a second, it was an error of assessment ”.
But to recover Mercedes did not use even one of the twelve development tokens available, preferring to allocate them to the 2022 project, as Wolff confirmed: “We didn’t even use a token. The intention was to build a new nose, but we have decided to allocate our resources elsewhere. We didn’t lose the championship because of the engine, but there is no doubt that we had problems for the first time in eight years. At the beginning it was a single defective component, then it became a kind of epidemic in which our power units lost power “. In the long interview granted to Auto, Motor und Sport, Wolff was spurred on to confront rivals he had during these years of the hybrid era: “We knew that Ferrari’s strength was in the engine, so it was clear that we could beat them by regaining speed on the straight. And then they made more mistakes. With Red Bull it was an exchange of blows, like two boxers in the ring“. Finally, the Austrian manager also hypothesized where he would have turned the attention of the engineers if he had had a free hand on the developments: “At some point we would have built a new chassis, or a new rear axle, in order to have more potential on the car ”.
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